I agree with virtually everything that you say, except that I do not think your alternative proposal of MFE should stand for Merit, Fairness and Equality. It should stand for Merit, Fairness and Equal Process.
When it comes to hiring, firing and promotions, by definition, one person comes out ahead of the others, so it cannot be called equality. The term “equality” can easily be exploited by DEI to overturn your entire proposal. What we need is for everyone to go through the same process and that process is a good faith attempt to judge based on merit (I.e. past achievements that are relevant to the job in question). That is very different from Equality.
Regarding legacy admissions, I thought it was a bit more complicated, since this system ends up attracting enough cash to private universities to enable a number of other students to attend on scholarships.
Also, I'm not sure why it should be the universities' responsibility to improve neighborhood schools..
As of two weeks ago, we now have DEIB (Belonging). I found the “literature” stating that Belonging was equal to the sum of D, I, and E, but now it is an independent variable. Another letter or two and they will have to go with a “+” sign. I am sure most people passionate about HxSTEM feel utmost belonging when it comes to the most important diversity that should be practiced on campus - the diversity of viewpoints.
This opinion piece was indeed prescient. We have had warning signs for a number of years, and now after 10/7, the evidence is obvious. Many of my Jewish colleagues were only too glad to jump on the woke bandwagon, only to discover that they were not really welcome, and were themselves targets.
In the elite institution I attended for graduate school, according to a friend who was on my PhD committee, all standards have been discarded in favor of DEI. He volunteered to teach fluid dynamics and was shocked to find that most of the graduate students had never even heard of calculus. None of them had studied any calculus at all. They were all admitted because of their DEI credentials, not because of competence.
He tells me that most faculty no longer visit their offices on campus for fear of assault by the graduate students, who are like a gang of roving thugs. They destroy receptions and artwork and vandalize the buildings. They demand that their graduate stipends be a "living wage" that they will receive for the rest of their lives, since they never have to graduate and cannot be expelled. Of course, they also decline to do any work in exchange for these stipends.
This is so different from what the atmosphere was like a few decades ago that it is unimaginable. It is like the institution is under siege from this DEI bureaucracy, and no one can figure out what to do in response.
This is a small research institute on one of the campuses of the University of California. It is probably not prudent for me to be more specific. But it is not that important, since the story probably applies to lots of other institutions.
I should mention that this organization is no longer particularly "elite". There were some "heavy hitters" there at one time, from or associated with Cambridge and my alma mater MIT. They did not replace themselves, and the place has descended into mediocrity.
At one time in its tiny narrow subfield, it competed with Moscow State University in the USSR and Cambridge Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Some might have even suggested it had the edge. But I do not think it is in these ranks now. It had its moment in the sun for a few decades, and then, its prominence waned.
My story should not be that surprising, considering what has gone on around the country after 10/7, what happened to Riley Gaines at SFSU, what happened when a Federal Judge visited Stanford University Law School, the troubles at Evergreen State College, etc. Many universities and academic institutions are teetering on the brink at the moment. Some claim the present mainstream institutions cannot be saved, and therefore are experimenting with new institutions like the University of Austin, Ralston College and the Peterson Academy. Others, like Chris Rufo, are advocating reforms of the existing institutions.
I do not know, personally. My mentor has said to me numerous times, after being subject to all kinds of problems, that 95% of the current faculty need to be fired, as well as at least 99% of the current administrative staff. I have heard shocking tales of agony from a friend who was a dean at UC Berkeley and another who was in a senior university administrative position at Louisiana State University. I have been underwhelmed in my interactions with faculty from CMU and the Naval Academy.
I had about 6 or so faculty offers, and they were beyond abysmal; even insulting. I could not believe they had the nerve to make such atrocious offers. I turned them all down, and took a far different route into the world of think tanks, with much, MUCH more substantial funding and freedom (of a sort, anyway). I also turned down positions as a quant, including one where I would manage the Nobel Prize Committee's funds. I still might consider financial engineering at some later point. For now, I am doing more substantial work.
I am currently contemplating a completely different approach to STEM R&D. The current models are broken (at least in the US and many other places), whether they are in academia, the corporate world, government or the nonprofit environment. Our least qualified are leading us and making most if not all the important decisions. Standards are atrocious, and publishing has turned into a sort of pathetic joke.
Whether some agree or not, the time has come when changes should be considered. They will be pretty painful, but they are necessary.
If we do not change what we are doing and how we are doing it, the pain later will be far, far worse.
I could also mention statistics, which is effectively banned at lots of places, like the engineering school at the University of Colorado or Princeton University. It makes no sense, but, that is what we are confronting.
I even recall having taken mathematical statistics as an undergraduate in physics. The response of the department "henchman" who had a master's degree in chemistry was to sing me the Mickey Mouse Club song.
Statistics does not get the respect it deserves, in my opinion. But, I have no influence at this point in time.
The Ivies are basically ignoring the Supreme Court decision. State legislatures have banned diversity statements in some states, and universities are just rebranding them as "service statements", or activist faculty are just quietly expecting applicants to say the right things about diversity in their teaching statements without being told to do so.
As to 7/23, this didn't reveal "the terrible reality of DEI". It just spooked Jewish Americans when they realized they're considered white devils. They're responding by seeking their own DEI carve-outs in the form of special prohibitions on antisemitism. Anti-white rhetoric? Crickets.
Legislative half-measures aren't going to do anything. There are too many ideologues in the system and they're dug in everywhere. As to the rest of it:
>Ctl-F 'white'
>One hit
"Crucially, this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants, in addition to those based on group membership."
The one time you mention the primary targets of DEI, it's to suggest a policy that would reduce white representation.
When the people pushing back against DEI from inside the system are so milquetoast, it's no surprise that the diversity zampolit rule without meaningful opposition.
Last sentences of the essay: "American universities are diverse not because of DEI, but because they have been extremely competitive at attracting talent from all over the world. Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. [End with "Now the USA does." instead of the following...] Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from. We should view this as a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit, and correct our course before it is too late."
The comparison with the Nazi regime is excellent! Indeed, we need often emphasize that amongst the DEI crowd, there are many Racists and Sexists (who mainly hold bigoted sentiments against "White Dudes").
Once again, the "Protocol Review and Monitoring Committee" has weighed in with assorted incoherent tripe. I swore to myself to never engage with PRMC directly after his repeated unprofessional antics and threats. He buys into the woke narrative so thoroughly that it is difficult to fathom why he frequents Heterodox STEM, except to troll.
His own academic and intellectual career is a dismal failure, and it is apparent to me that MOST agree with this assessment and mostly ignore his disordered rants. I find that reassuring and heart-warming.
It is not a surprise that he shares some academic provenance with the problematic figure Holden Thorp. For someone so thoroughly captured by the woke ideology, it is almost comical that Thorp has a name so dripping with white privilege. PRMC's real name similarly reeks of whiteness.
Perhaps PRMC and HT should both change their names, if they want to be "down with the struggle".
LOL back atcha. Good one! In the land of ad hominems ... the one ad hominem is as good as any other ad hominem. McCullough actually reads Peter Boghossian. So he surely knows, then, that Portland State can't be much of a University. But maybe he doesn't believe Peter. Who knows (who cares).
Dorian, I saw your reference to 10/7 in the intro to your reprinting of your essay and I thought, "there he goes again." I think the issue, succinctly put, is that by trying to emphasize the seriousness of the issue you're writing about, in each case you reference a much more serious historical event, and it detracts from your position because it distracts and it makes the reader think that you're lacking perspective. The latter is an error of the reader/commentator because from your cited reference (and other writing you made contemporaneously with the Newsweek article) it seemed clear to me that you did have a learned perspective, but I can tell you that I had heard others in 2021 characterize your essay simplistically as "he compared DEI programs to the Nazi's behavior." One can assign blame for an essay, if one wishes to assign blame, to the reader or the writer or some combination of both. Again, I think the essay would have been less vulnerable to such criticism if it had stopped sooner and didn't advance to the Nazi comparison.
Now the USA does!!! A Platonist disagreed with you in 1987 in the person of Allan Bloom who wrote The Closing of the American Mind. 10 years before that an Aristotelian, Mortimer Jerome Adler [Aristotle For Everybody ... 10 Philosophical Mistakes etc. etc.] indicated that American University level "scholars" had become incapable of doing much more than leveling incomprehensible Academic "cant" at each other --- unintelligible to normal English speakers. For God's sake, man! You are almost 50 years "out of touch" with what is going on in other parts of American Universities. My bet is that you must have a grant to do Astronomy, access to a radio telescope and think of (or pay attention to) almost nothing other than radio waves from the nebulae out there. Lucky you --- but earth is calling. WAKE UP!
My suggested ending with a comparison of the desirability of US universities to others was largely referring to STEM disciplines and admittedly is based on anecdotal observations throughout my career.
You led a team out of Johns Hopkins University that discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star 600 light years from here in 2006. You don't do "anecdotes". So you ought to replace "anecdotal observations" with the phrase "experience and observation". Of course Johns Hopkins is not Evergreen State College, which provides its students with a significantly different sort of "education". But you are still wrong about politics.
The men's essay listed why DEI "lenses" and acts were causing American Universities to go down hill for the first 5 paragraphs of their essay. Then they provided an alternative to the DEI "lens" and activities with pgph. 6. And they concluded with the 7th pgph. Review the paragraphs in short:
1. DEI is causing profound transformation threatening gain and spread of knowledge.
2. DEI is discriminatory and excludes competent applicants.
3. DEI violates legal and ethical principles.
4. DEI undermines the truth mission of the university.
5. DEI erodes the public's confidence in the value of a university degree.
6. Another set of criteria with a different acronym could be implemented to address equality rather than equity (E) issue.
7. We already have a diverse and inclusive (D & I) situation, so we don't need a race based ideology, for Germany applied one and wrecked their universities.
But you would go 1 through 6 and conclude "THEREFORE we have the best universities whereas Germany formerly had them."!!!
In short and in sum your goofy conclusion doesn't follow from the 5 paragraph length PREMISES which directly contradict your goofy "Best Universities" conclusion. That is called LOGIC, rather than OBSERVATION, Dr. McCullough.
hi Kevin, upon reflection, I agree with you. Thank you for the rebuttal. My suggestion to end the paragraph that way ("Now the USA does.") wouldn't have made sense in the context of Dorian's essay. I was trying to retain absolutely as much of his essay, i.e. do the minimum editorial cutting, to accomplish the task of removing the Nazi comparison, which I will repeat is distracting and lacks perspective/proportion/reasonableness. Much better would have been to have deleted the entire paragraph, i.e. Jerry Coyne's suggestion from August 2021, as I noted in a separate comment yesterday.
Now, I might add that while I agree with you that the essay wouldn't have ended well with a disconnected claim that the USA has the best universities now, and I agree with you that it would be logically disconnected, I wouldn't agree that it is incorrect, especially in STEM. A lot of implementations of DEI are wrong, harmful, etc, and I will say as much, but they aren't doing as much damage as opponents market. And even if they are damaging US universities, the USA university "ecosystem" (in STEM particularly, especially 1950-2000) was so far above any other nation's, it'll take a lot of hits before it is not the envy of the world. Very few STEM professors (or students) are actually engaged in DEI - yes, they might take an online course for an hour each semester, but most simply hold their nose long enough to get back to their lab, computer, or classroom AND CARRY ON.
Dorian et al. are doing yeoman's work in trying to bring attention to problems and especially commendable is that they are proposing alternatives, not just slinging arrows pseudonymously from their bunkers (looking at many of the commentators here). Nothing in my commentary is meant as a criticism of any other parts of the essay - many commentators simplistically cannot seem to differentiate a specific criticism from an all-out assault. Indeed, when I first read the essay in 2021, I shugged and thought, "Maybe there's a point here..." (and went about my business). It was only after I heard from a distinguished colleague something like, "Dorian has likened DEI efforts to the holocaust!" and my eyes bugged out (literally) in astonishment, and when I went looking for that essay, all I could do was decide the colleague was referencing the Newsweek article and its last paragraph. The holocaust wasn't Dorian's comparison, but my point here is THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE READ AND REMEMBER. And that's why a helpful editorial suggestion would have been, before it was published, to (in Coyne's words), “For crying out loud, take out this damn paragraph!”
I admit that I still shrug at Dorian's essay today and honestly cannot get past the reference to the Nazi's: it's that distracting to me, I cannot engage with any of the other ideas. Maybe in a different venue, without that last paragraph, I could. Dorian and I have communicate multiple times in private communications. Here's the beginning of an email that I sent him in February 2022, following his canceled talk at MIT (that was later hosted at Princeton by Zoom). "I am also an exoplanet researcher and HxA member since 2017. Your canceled MIT talk came up yesterday, so this morning I thought I would email you to express my support, with some reservations, for your viewpoints. Also please hear my unreserved admiration for your courage (or foolhardiness, I sometimes think when I open my mouth!) to write on the topic of DEI. I'm writing because I bet you have received a lot of emails from detractors and in my limited experience, it is helpful to hear from some supporters, so that you know that you are not alone and that we haven't all gone completely bonkers...."
It's too bad how hardened our culture has become over the years. I attribute a lot to social media. Even a forum, like this one, expressly oriented toward centering constructive disagreement, falls victim to the toxic commentary of pseudonymous fools, influenced by bigger fools like Christopher Rufo. (I think he and Dorian are on a university board together! But I might be - probably/hopefully am - confusing things I have read.) I have bookmarked Rufo's essay "The Cat Eaters of Ohio" because it's really a Woodward-and-Bernstein level investigation. (Kidding, obviously). Such an essay convinces me that this toxic miasm will not last: both the excesses of DEI and the much greater excesses of those pushing a culture war for their own political power will fade away, hopefully when another electoral loss is delivered to their leader in a month. When the wackos can no longer get power through trumping up culture wars, they will be forced to try another conduit, or they will be supplanted by those centering more traditional, conservative values. https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-cat-eaters-of-ohio
Well said. Dorian's reference to the starvation caused in Ukraine by Marxist policies [Holodomor; or some such word; I don't even recall where I read it or even whether or not it was his essay], where the Soviets got rid of competent farmers, with resultant starvation, is a better comparison than Nazis kicking competent Jews and other dissenters out of universities. One is physical starvation when you get rid of competent farmers. The other is mental starvation when you get rid of competent thinkers.
You Americans are 34 trillion dollars in debt. But nobody ever asks the question:- From whom did the American Government borrow this 34 trillion? How much money have you put into your pension plan, Dr. McCullough? How much have you got in your savings account? Your leaders have borrowed all of it X 1.5 and allowed Banks to loan out about 1.5 X that amount, for a total of 3X whatever you've given banks and other funds. They borrowed it from you and a whole bunch of other people like you. Then they tell you what your "share" of the national debt is or that rich people should "pay their fair share". When you loan them money, you don't have to pay it back --- they do to you!!!
It took a hyperinflation and the resultant political chaos to bring goofy-mustache to power in Germany. Who might you get, if the Chinese persuade others to dump the American dollar as the world's reserve currency and the American dollar value begins to decrease rapidly because the world starts giving you back all those dollars that have gone overseas?
Idle thoughts, given nothing to debate about your post. Good job.
The USA's super-power status militarily is its collateral/enforcement mechanism for all obligations including that debt. It's only ~100 Elon Musk's worth. ; )
More seriously, of course it's current value is not a problem itself, so much as the dependency on its growth with time: that's the real problem.
"Give a man a fish, or teach a man to fish?" <--> "Give a nation some debt, or teach it to rely on deficit spending?"
I think the multilateral power of nations in the 21st century is perhaps the most serious issue geopolitical problem. If the USA and China can arrange, as they seem to be trying to do, to restore the world to a two-super-power stasis, that may be more stable. And China and the USA are so interdependent, any cold war/competition between the two is likely to be less fraught than the 20th century cold war. Of course, Europe and Russia will want their own status not overlooked. A related vulnerability is the ever increasing power (via technology) of individuals and small groups of individuals, or small nations. Those are my musings.
On geologic or astronomical or religious timescales, it's all gonna go to zero eventually. On climatic timescales, it's already headed that way and picking up speed. As someone once said, in the future it'll be good to live in any country that has snow plows and air conditioners. The former is an indicator of a not-too-hot climate (initially anyway) and the latter an indicator of relative wealth (and hence ability to cope).
Oops - this comment is way off topic. Enough. Good hearing from you, and thanks for contributing/disagreeing in a meaningful and civil manner.
Also wanted to share the posting made by the Chief of DEI, on October 7th, 'A Year of Revelations,' .
I felt exactly like someone mentioned in the comment 'Posting celebratory content on a day like October 7th, which marks a painful memory for many, like 9/11, could come across as tone-deaf or out of touch with what others are feeling. It’s always worth considering how timing might impact different audiences, especially in your role that champions diversity, equity, and inclusion.'
I agree with nearly everything this article says with one major exception. Athletic admissions should NOT be considered in the same category as "legacy" admissions and are in fact merit based. First, the article, likely by how the sentence was written, incorrectly states that athletic admissions favor white applicants. The greatest benefit from athletic admissions vis a vis regular admissions accrues to African Americans who likely would NOT be competitive to enter the universities in question with scholarships purely on academic merits. Unlike legacy or DEI admissions which are based on either your family connections or race/gender etc. none of which are based in merit, student athletes are admitted precisely BECAUSE of their athletic talent. It is the probably the purest example of merit based admission in academia. Now, one could argue that athletics should not be part of university life, but the reality is that athletics has always been a part of a classical education and our society would probably benefit of the average student had more athletic course requirements placed upon them, not less. College athletes must demonstrate merit in the tasks for which they were recruited while also performing adequately in their course work. Most student athletes are forced to maintain schedules that their non-athlete peers would NOT be able to sustain without major problems to their academic performance. While universities provide some academic support to their athletes (some even crossing the line into academic misconduct) overall, these do not compensate for the added physical and time commitments placed on student athletes. Given the revenue and marketing services that student athletes bring to their universities, they are more than pulling their weight based on the merit of the skills they bring to the court, field or ice. I would encourage faculty to actually learn more about the lives of student athletes before casting judgement against them.
Absolutely not. Athletic merit has nothing to do with the ability to pursue and reach academic goals. One has nothing to do with the other. No one who is not as academically qualified as the other students should be able to get into a university based on athletic merit. If anything, the sports teams should be professionalized and separated from the university proper. They could hire the most qualified athletes to play on the teams, reserving academic spots for the best and the brightest. If a student is qualified to enter the university on academic merit AND is a gifted athlete, they should be able to get paid for participation on sports teams as a way of financing their education. But only then.
ClemenceDane, I think you mistake the role athletics plays in the lives of most student athletes. Most of these students know they are not destined for a professional athletic career and are likely not really trying to achieve that. They are playing their sport because it is a part of their identity and is something they enjoy and often is a skill they bring that the university wants and is prepared to give partial or even full scholarship support to get them. Most of these students could attend a university without playing their sport, but choose which school they will attend because of the opportunity the school provides. This is no different than a student choosing a university for its music program or its engineering program over competitors that do not offer such options. Sadly, many student athletes efforts on behalf of their universities are NOT respected by faculty who feel athletics has no place on campus or that athletes are given unfair privileges/benefits either in admission or during their programs. I have seen faculty actively try to harm student athletes for missing class for their away games by telling them they have to choose between being a "serious" student or the "choice" to play a game. A student athlete no an athletic scholarship who doesn't fulfill their teams obligations will lose their scholarship and no longer be in school. Even when a scholarship is not in jeopardy, the student is part of a team and does not want to harm others on the team by not playing their role. The same faculty I have seen treat student athletes this way never applied that same standard to a student needing to miss a class for the debate time, a scientific conference or due to pregnancy. All of those are also choices that interfere with classes. Ironically, the inferiors status many academics hold toward athletics would not be understood or respected by the Greek scholars. It would also not fly at any of the military academies where athletic fitness is a requirement that students must hit benchmarks on so as to be ready for deployment by graduation. I asked an instructor from West Point is most college students could pass these requirements and he laughingly said no. He did say that college athletes would have no problem with the physical requirements of the academies. We have to remember that MERIT always exists in a context. Given the growing number of wars around the world and the fact that college students are THE age from which draftees come, our universities are doing their students a massive disservice in ignoring their athletic development. Just a thought....as the DEI world is NOT going to let elite college students avoid the next draft with deferrals while the working class is called to fight.
I agree, in some ways. The influence of athletics in American academia is a bit extreme. And I am not wild about it. I know it provides some income for various schools, and so on, but, at what cost?
I agree that a student should not be admitted to a university for athletic ability when they LACK the academic ability. That is not the case with most student athletes however. Let us compare the situation of a legacy, athlete and "regular" student. All 3 apply to a university and are expected to meet certain standards in various subjects related to study at a university. Not all students, however, will be admitted to an elite school which must choose from a subset to admit from a large applicant pool. With legacy admissions, weight is given to the family status of the applicant to admit them over other equally academically qualified students. With a student athlete, the decision to admit is based on an athletic ability NOT shared by others in the applicant pool. As such, their application is based on merit...not family or DEI status. Let us consider the same argument against student athletes could be used to keep up students with musical and artistic talents who are merely "average" in other areas. As said before, if all students had the demands placed on their time and energy that student athletes are expected to provide, most of these "regular" students would crash and burn under the load and fail to meet academic expectations as sometimes occurs with student athletes who underperform academically.
Hi Dean, I enjoyed your comments here, but I think you misjudged Dorian's article on the athletics. I searched it for athletics and found the single reference and it cites a PDF, which I searched and found footnote 6 which reads, "Removing preferences for recruited athletes leaves the number of African Americans essentially unchanged, with increases for Hispanic and Asian American admits. Removing legacy preferences increases the number of admits for each of the non-white groups." Footnote 6 is attached to a sentence, "We find that removing either of these preferences [legacy and athletes] would result in significantly fewer white admits with increases or no change in the number of African American, Hispanic, and Asian American admits." So Dorian's essay rephrases the issue of athletes per the cited source, which related to the Harvard case before the SCOTUS. Maybe you're position is correct for universities more broadly, I don't know.
It's intriguing to me how you make a criticism and respondents engage on your ideas, but if I make a comment, well... read for yourself. Such commentary makes me shake my head slowly and think about the expression on the woman's T-shirt that I linked to in my comment about Godwin's law. This venue could be a place for good discussion, but it isn't. Instead it is another echo chamber; far better than TwitterX but that's not saying much at all. Thank you for adding some cogent words and ideas in the comment section.
In this morning's Dealbook email from Andrew Ross Sorkin, his words help me understand why Dorian referenced 10/7 and then considers it mind-boggling for me to comment as I did about Godwin's law and Dorian's essay. I agree with Sorkin's last paragraph particularly. (Yes, Sorkin is the same person who interviewed Elon Musk when he famously told advertisers to "Go F*&^ Themselves." That's the same Elon Musk who last weekend earned the moniker, "DorkMAGA" when he jumped for joy on stage and then expressed he was "DarkMAGA.")
"Good morning. Andrew here. Today marks a year since Hamas’s barbaric murder spree in Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and some 250 others abducted. It was a moment that reshaped geopolitics, prompting Israel to go to war in Gaza in an effort to eliminate Hamas and giving rise to an escalating war in the Middle East that has killed tens of thousands and could ultimately transform the region.
It also marked a tipping point within many major American institutions, in business, higher education and beyond. Debates about diversity, equity and inclusion policies and so-called wokeness were raging before Oct. 7, 2023, but they took on new life after the attacks as protests broke out on college campuses and company messaging apps — some even before Israel had officially begun its military retaliation.
Elements of those demonstrations were laced with antisemitism, raising questions for some about what younger generations were being taught. And for some Jewish business leaders — many of whom had vocally supported D.E.I. initiatives — what emerged was a sense that there hadn’t been reciprocal protection from harassment and harm. A renewed backlash against D.E.I. erupted, including from prominent executives such as the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and the private equity mogul Marc Rowan, and some institutions played down their commitment to the approach.
The end result, sadly, is that we as a society are more divided than ever — when such a tragic event should have brought us together.
Hi Peter, my point which the article we are responding to raised, was that many in academia have the false notion that athletic emissions are like legacy and DEI admissions in being based on demographic/relation characteristics rather than merit. The original article linked athletic admissions to legacy admissions which is NOT appropriate. My point is that athletes are admitted on merit based on the athletic skills they bring and which the university is seeking when it fields a team that the athlete has skills for. It is no different than a university offering a scholarship to a musician needed to fill a spot in their orchestra, a talented theater major to support their Shakespeare festival, etc. While the university as a whole admits students generally, specific programs seek specific skills in their students and may value some skills, athletic, musical, artistic, mathematic over others as fits their needs. These are merit based admissions and its time we confront the anti-athlete sentiment. Assuming a black student is a DEI or affirmative action admission is not fair to the student unless backed by evidence that they are not academic qualified. Athletes deserve the same respect and not be simply written off as dumb jocks admitted to make the football team do well. Hope this makes sense.
Makes sense to me and thanks for taking the time to reply. My comment was keying in on your sentence in your original comment, "The greatest benefit from athletic admissions vis a vis regular admissions accrues to African Americans who likely would NOT be competitive to enter the universities in question with scholarships purely on academic merits." I suppose that sentence can be interpreted in different ways, so feel free to clarify, but my reply was just pointing out that the cited reference (Arcidiacono et al. 2020) stated that athletic preferences at Harvard tend to admit more *white* students than the rest of the admission policies in aggregate. (The whole thing is VERY complicated, as evidenced by that article running 46 pages and the SCOTUS review, etc etc). But I wholeheartedly agree with you that athletes aren't necessarily dumb jocks (some are, but many are not). I especially liked your comment, "Most student athletes are forced to maintain schedules that their non-athlete peers would NOT be able to sustain without major problems to their academic performance." Very true.
More generally, there's tension between the applicant's right to be treated fairly as an individual and the university's interest in recruiting the "best" incoming class each year. To give a sports analogy, the recruiter for an NFL team doesn't want the best players...they want the best *team* that they can recruit.
Also, I think there's a strong moral rationale (and practical rationale) for your comment, "Assuming a black student is a DEI or affirmative action admission is not fair to the student ..." and I think that argument is compelling and I hope we get close to that ideal in our society sooner rather than later particularly for that reason. University life already is a long way there...certainly more so than society writ larger, but politicians and such tend to see the glass half empty because they think it serves their purposes to ding university culture.
Hi Peter, Sorry for the delay in replying. To clarify my comments on who would benefits from athletic scholarships, I was not referring specifically to Harvard or to the Ivy League/Research I universities but academia generally. On a lot of these issues, what part of academia you are talking about actually ends up being very important. My experience teaching at various levels from community college to comprehensive 4 year schools to elite private research universities suggests that athletic scholarships, if probably given, enable students who are college ready to attend a specific school to play their sport that they would not have chosen or could not afford without that scholarship. Their sport is important to the student and will influence where they choose to go from among multiple options. At the community college level, the scholarship that comes from the sport may be the only way they can afford to get a start in college. The Minnesota community colleges tend to draw most of their students from within 90 minutes of campus, yet if you looked at the football and basketball teams, you see an entirely different demographic with rural Iron Range schools whose community diversity ranges from Norwegians to Swedes to Finns to Germans to various Slavic groups of Eastern Europe with football and basketball teams dominated by African Americans from Detroit, Chicago and rural schools in the Deep South. Many of these students are their first in their family to go to college and the family cannot even afford to visit them so far away. They are playing their sport not just out of enjoyment but because they have enough talent that they hope to transfer to a 4 year college with a scholarship that will pay for the rest of their degree. Few actually expect to get a professional career. These students are very vulnerable in some ways as the coaches sometimes make unreasonable demands on the students' time, negatively impacting their academics. The student is then in an impossible situation as they are far from home and face the devil's choice of losing their scholarship by not performing on the field or failing too many classes and being rendered ineligible or giving them too low a GPA to transfer. What they don't need is academics stereotyping them as unjustly admitted in the same way that Legacy Admits are. Given how few students successfully walk on to college athletic teams, these student athletes can truly say they were chosen for merit based on the position the college recruited them for as few of the other students in the college have the abilities to merit replacing them.
Hi Dean - good commentary, thanks. The athletic and legacy admissions favor the university's interests ($$). Whether it's the government's business, I don't know (at least for private universities). You and Dorian and Anna articulate your positions pretty well. Even if I disagree sometimes with those positions, it's informative to read/listen to them.
Just like the situation you addressed where it's unfair and rude to a student to assume they got admitted preferentially because of their skin color, it's similarly unfair and rude to the legacy admit to assume it was because of their familial connections. Eliminating that might be tricky, and it's not clear to me legacy admission is actually awful, but it would be nice for a child of a very rich person to be confident that they were admitted on their own merits.
In the few interactions I have had with the development offices of universities, I have always been very impressed with their "people skills." Makes sense, but it's interesting to experience, since in STEM we more often interact with people that have less keenly developed (or atrophied!) "people skills."
Very true. Most legacy students come from affluent and educated families meaning they likely would be competitive at many colleges, though maybe not the most select. There is a difference between legacy admissions than athletic and other merit based admissions. Athletic talent, musical talent, mathematical talent all refer to an attribute of the student that they bring to the campus. Legacy status has nothing to do with the attributes of the student, it is truly a status indicator more akin to skin color, gender or sexual orientation which are inherent to the student but say nothing about their abilities. That is why legacy admissions, like DEI admits, are NOT based in merit. That said, from a university relations/fundraising point of view...development officers see legacy admissions as serving their revenue purposes.
True. The real problem is probably not legacy admissions...it is the hiring bias toward those graduating from elite institutions. Eliminate that hiring bias and the incentive for legacy admissions drops immensely.
It is time to remove dribbling, shooting, running, passing, jumping, and all the other racist criteria the NBA uses to exclude old, white women from being represented.
Whoa! Cat on a hot tin Rufo, courtesy of Peter R. McCullough's post and link at the bottom! Political science, politics and investigative journalism gets weird!
I agree with virtually everything that you say, except that I do not think your alternative proposal of MFE should stand for Merit, Fairness and Equality. It should stand for Merit, Fairness and Equal Process.
When it comes to hiring, firing and promotions, by definition, one person comes out ahead of the others, so it cannot be called equality. The term “equality” can easily be exploited by DEI to overturn your entire proposal. What we need is for everyone to go through the same process and that process is a good faith attempt to judge based on merit (I.e. past achievements that are relevant to the job in question). That is very different from Equality.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-merit-of-merit-part-1
Dear Dorian,
You are more than vindicated. You and Ivan are heroes!
Thank you for seeing the problem and fighting for the solution.
Thanks,
randy
It's impressive that you wrote this in 2021.
Regarding legacy admissions, I thought it was a bit more complicated, since this system ends up attracting enough cash to private universities to enable a number of other students to attend on scholarships.
Also, I'm not sure why it should be the universities' responsibility to improve neighborhood schools..
Absolutely right. DEI is utterly toxic.
Cheers!
As Niall Ferguson said recently in re Harvard, the fastest way to destroy a university is to hand a DEI sign over the door.
Well summarized, Dorian.
As of two weeks ago, we now have DEIB (Belonging). I found the “literature” stating that Belonging was equal to the sum of D, I, and E, but now it is an independent variable. Another letter or two and they will have to go with a “+” sign. I am sure most people passionate about HxSTEM feel utmost belonging when it comes to the most important diversity that should be practiced on campus - the diversity of viewpoints.
This opinion piece was indeed prescient. We have had warning signs for a number of years, and now after 10/7, the evidence is obvious. Many of my Jewish colleagues were only too glad to jump on the woke bandwagon, only to discover that they were not really welcome, and were themselves targets.
In the elite institution I attended for graduate school, according to a friend who was on my PhD committee, all standards have been discarded in favor of DEI. He volunteered to teach fluid dynamics and was shocked to find that most of the graduate students had never even heard of calculus. None of them had studied any calculus at all. They were all admitted because of their DEI credentials, not because of competence.
He tells me that most faculty no longer visit their offices on campus for fear of assault by the graduate students, who are like a gang of roving thugs. They destroy receptions and artwork and vandalize the buildings. They demand that their graduate stipends be a "living wage" that they will receive for the rest of their lives, since they never have to graduate and cannot be expelled. Of course, they also decline to do any work in exchange for these stipends.
This is so different from what the atmosphere was like a few decades ago that it is unimaginable. It is like the institution is under siege from this DEI bureaucracy, and no one can figure out what to do in response.
If you don't mind me asking, which University with Department is this?
This is a small research institute on one of the campuses of the University of California. It is probably not prudent for me to be more specific. But it is not that important, since the story probably applies to lots of other institutions.
I should mention that this organization is no longer particularly "elite". There were some "heavy hitters" there at one time, from or associated with Cambridge and my alma mater MIT. They did not replace themselves, and the place has descended into mediocrity.
At one time in its tiny narrow subfield, it competed with Moscow State University in the USSR and Cambridge Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Some might have even suggested it had the edge. But I do not think it is in these ranks now. It had its moment in the sun for a few decades, and then, its prominence waned.
My story should not be that surprising, considering what has gone on around the country after 10/7, what happened to Riley Gaines at SFSU, what happened when a Federal Judge visited Stanford University Law School, the troubles at Evergreen State College, etc. Many universities and academic institutions are teetering on the brink at the moment. Some claim the present mainstream institutions cannot be saved, and therefore are experimenting with new institutions like the University of Austin, Ralston College and the Peterson Academy. Others, like Chris Rufo, are advocating reforms of the existing institutions.
I do not know, personally. My mentor has said to me numerous times, after being subject to all kinds of problems, that 95% of the current faculty need to be fired, as well as at least 99% of the current administrative staff. I have heard shocking tales of agony from a friend who was a dean at UC Berkeley and another who was in a senior university administrative position at Louisiana State University. I have been underwhelmed in my interactions with faculty from CMU and the Naval Academy.
I had about 6 or so faculty offers, and they were beyond abysmal; even insulting. I could not believe they had the nerve to make such atrocious offers. I turned them all down, and took a far different route into the world of think tanks, with much, MUCH more substantial funding and freedom (of a sort, anyway). I also turned down positions as a quant, including one where I would manage the Nobel Prize Committee's funds. I still might consider financial engineering at some later point. For now, I am doing more substantial work.
I am currently contemplating a completely different approach to STEM R&D. The current models are broken (at least in the US and many other places), whether they are in academia, the corporate world, government or the nonprofit environment. Our least qualified are leading us and making most if not all the important decisions. Standards are atrocious, and publishing has turned into a sort of pathetic joke.
Whether some agree or not, the time has come when changes should be considered. They will be pretty painful, but they are necessary.
If we do not change what we are doing and how we are doing it, the pain later will be far, far worse.
Oceanography... It's surely sad that they neglect Calculus these days :(
I could also mention statistics, which is effectively banned at lots of places, like the engineering school at the University of Colorado or Princeton University. It makes no sense, but, that is what we are confronting.
I even recall having taken mathematical statistics as an undergraduate in physics. The response of the department "henchman" who had a master's degree in chemistry was to sing me the Mickey Mouse Club song.
Statistics does not get the respect it deserves, in my opinion. But, I have no influence at this point in time.
The Ivies are basically ignoring the Supreme Court decision. State legislatures have banned diversity statements in some states, and universities are just rebranding them as "service statements", or activist faculty are just quietly expecting applicants to say the right things about diversity in their teaching statements without being told to do so.
As to 7/23, this didn't reveal "the terrible reality of DEI". It just spooked Jewish Americans when they realized they're considered white devils. They're responding by seeking their own DEI carve-outs in the form of special prohibitions on antisemitism. Anti-white rhetoric? Crickets.
Legislative half-measures aren't going to do anything. There are too many ideologues in the system and they're dug in everywhere. As to the rest of it:
>Ctl-F 'white'
>One hit
"Crucially, this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants, in addition to those based on group membership."
The one time you mention the primary targets of DEI, it's to suggest a policy that would reduce white representation.
When the people pushing back against DEI from inside the system are so milquetoast, it's no surprise that the diversity zampolit rule without meaningful opposition.
I very much appreciated your original publication in Newsweek. Thanks again for sharing it here!!!
Dorian's essay succumbed to Godwin's law: the essay went on too long by half a paragraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#/media/File:Godwin's_law_t-shirt_at_Rally_to_restore_sanity,_2010.jpg
Last sentences of the essay: "American universities are diverse not because of DEI, but because they have been extremely competitive at attracting talent from all over the world. Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. [End with "Now the USA does." instead of the following...] Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from. We should view this as a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit, and correct our course before it is too late."
Its mind-boggling that you could think that after 10/7.
The comparison with the Nazi regime is excellent! Indeed, we need often emphasize that amongst the DEI crowd, there are many Racists and Sexists (who mainly hold bigoted sentiments against "White Dudes").
Once again, the "Protocol Review and Monitoring Committee" has weighed in with assorted incoherent tripe. I swore to myself to never engage with PRMC directly after his repeated unprofessional antics and threats. He buys into the woke narrative so thoroughly that it is difficult to fathom why he frequents Heterodox STEM, except to troll.
His own academic and intellectual career is a dismal failure, and it is apparent to me that MOST agree with this assessment and mostly ignore his disordered rants. I find that reassuring and heart-warming.
It is not a surprise that he shares some academic provenance with the problematic figure Holden Thorp. For someone so thoroughly captured by the woke ideology, it is almost comical that Thorp has a name so dripping with white privilege. PRMC's real name similarly reeks of whiteness.
Perhaps PRMC and HT should both change their names, if they want to be "down with the struggle".
Galaxies are boggling his mind --- Maybe. Maybe not. Could be that dark matter has darkened his mind.
McCullough is a propagandist. A poor one.
And you are an ad hominest. And there is no such thing as a "good" one!
LOL back atcha. Good one! In the land of ad hominems ... the one ad hominem is as good as any other ad hominem. McCullough actually reads Peter Boghossian. So he surely knows, then, that Portland State can't be much of a University. But maybe he doesn't believe Peter. Who knows (who cares).
You induced PRMC to delete a post. At least this time he did not threaten legal action, as far as I know.
Dorian, I saw your reference to 10/7 in the intro to your reprinting of your essay and I thought, "there he goes again." I think the issue, succinctly put, is that by trying to emphasize the seriousness of the issue you're writing about, in each case you reference a much more serious historical event, and it detracts from your position because it distracts and it makes the reader think that you're lacking perspective. The latter is an error of the reader/commentator because from your cited reference (and other writing you made contemporaneously with the Newsweek article) it seemed clear to me that you did have a learned perspective, but I can tell you that I had heard others in 2021 characterize your essay simplistically as "he compared DEI programs to the Nazi's behavior." One can assign blame for an essay, if one wishes to assign blame, to the reader or the writer or some combination of both. Again, I think the essay would have been less vulnerable to such criticism if it had stopped sooner and didn't advance to the Nazi comparison.
"but I can tell you that I had heard others in 2021 characterize your essay simplistically as "he compared DEI programs to the Nazi's behavior." "
Assassination by innuendo. Ugly.
Ugly nonsense is PRMC's stock in trade.
Now the USA does!!! A Platonist disagreed with you in 1987 in the person of Allan Bloom who wrote The Closing of the American Mind. 10 years before that an Aristotelian, Mortimer Jerome Adler [Aristotle For Everybody ... 10 Philosophical Mistakes etc. etc.] indicated that American University level "scholars" had become incapable of doing much more than leveling incomprehensible Academic "cant" at each other --- unintelligible to normal English speakers. For God's sake, man! You are almost 50 years "out of touch" with what is going on in other parts of American Universities. My bet is that you must have a grant to do Astronomy, access to a radio telescope and think of (or pay attention to) almost nothing other than radio waves from the nebulae out there. Lucky you --- but earth is calling. WAKE UP!
My suggested ending with a comparison of the desirability of US universities to others was largely referring to STEM disciplines and admittedly is based on anecdotal observations throughout my career.
You led a team out of Johns Hopkins University that discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star 600 light years from here in 2006. You don't do "anecdotes". So you ought to replace "anecdotal observations" with the phrase "experience and observation". Of course Johns Hopkins is not Evergreen State College, which provides its students with a significantly different sort of "education". But you are still wrong about politics.
The men's essay listed why DEI "lenses" and acts were causing American Universities to go down hill for the first 5 paragraphs of their essay. Then they provided an alternative to the DEI "lens" and activities with pgph. 6. And they concluded with the 7th pgph. Review the paragraphs in short:
1. DEI is causing profound transformation threatening gain and spread of knowledge.
2. DEI is discriminatory and excludes competent applicants.
3. DEI violates legal and ethical principles.
4. DEI undermines the truth mission of the university.
5. DEI erodes the public's confidence in the value of a university degree.
6. Another set of criteria with a different acronym could be implemented to address equality rather than equity (E) issue.
7. We already have a diverse and inclusive (D & I) situation, so we don't need a race based ideology, for Germany applied one and wrecked their universities.
But you would go 1 through 6 and conclude "THEREFORE we have the best universities whereas Germany formerly had them."!!!
In short and in sum your goofy conclusion doesn't follow from the 5 paragraph length PREMISES which directly contradict your goofy "Best Universities" conclusion. That is called LOGIC, rather than OBSERVATION, Dr. McCullough.
Your new admirer [Well done on the exoplanet!]
Kevin
hi Kevin, upon reflection, I agree with you. Thank you for the rebuttal. My suggestion to end the paragraph that way ("Now the USA does.") wouldn't have made sense in the context of Dorian's essay. I was trying to retain absolutely as much of his essay, i.e. do the minimum editorial cutting, to accomplish the task of removing the Nazi comparison, which I will repeat is distracting and lacks perspective/proportion/reasonableness. Much better would have been to have deleted the entire paragraph, i.e. Jerry Coyne's suggestion from August 2021, as I noted in a separate comment yesterday.
Now, I might add that while I agree with you that the essay wouldn't have ended well with a disconnected claim that the USA has the best universities now, and I agree with you that it would be logically disconnected, I wouldn't agree that it is incorrect, especially in STEM. A lot of implementations of DEI are wrong, harmful, etc, and I will say as much, but they aren't doing as much damage as opponents market. And even if they are damaging US universities, the USA university "ecosystem" (in STEM particularly, especially 1950-2000) was so far above any other nation's, it'll take a lot of hits before it is not the envy of the world. Very few STEM professors (or students) are actually engaged in DEI - yes, they might take an online course for an hour each semester, but most simply hold their nose long enough to get back to their lab, computer, or classroom AND CARRY ON.
Dorian et al. are doing yeoman's work in trying to bring attention to problems and especially commendable is that they are proposing alternatives, not just slinging arrows pseudonymously from their bunkers (looking at many of the commentators here). Nothing in my commentary is meant as a criticism of any other parts of the essay - many commentators simplistically cannot seem to differentiate a specific criticism from an all-out assault. Indeed, when I first read the essay in 2021, I shugged and thought, "Maybe there's a point here..." (and went about my business). It was only after I heard from a distinguished colleague something like, "Dorian has likened DEI efforts to the holocaust!" and my eyes bugged out (literally) in astonishment, and when I went looking for that essay, all I could do was decide the colleague was referencing the Newsweek article and its last paragraph. The holocaust wasn't Dorian's comparison, but my point here is THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE READ AND REMEMBER. And that's why a helpful editorial suggestion would have been, before it was published, to (in Coyne's words), “For crying out loud, take out this damn paragraph!”
I admit that I still shrug at Dorian's essay today and honestly cannot get past the reference to the Nazi's: it's that distracting to me, I cannot engage with any of the other ideas. Maybe in a different venue, without that last paragraph, I could. Dorian and I have communicate multiple times in private communications. Here's the beginning of an email that I sent him in February 2022, following his canceled talk at MIT (that was later hosted at Princeton by Zoom). "I am also an exoplanet researcher and HxA member since 2017. Your canceled MIT talk came up yesterday, so this morning I thought I would email you to express my support, with some reservations, for your viewpoints. Also please hear my unreserved admiration for your courage (or foolhardiness, I sometimes think when I open my mouth!) to write on the topic of DEI. I'm writing because I bet you have received a lot of emails from detractors and in my limited experience, it is helpful to hear from some supporters, so that you know that you are not alone and that we haven't all gone completely bonkers...."
It's too bad how hardened our culture has become over the years. I attribute a lot to social media. Even a forum, like this one, expressly oriented toward centering constructive disagreement, falls victim to the toxic commentary of pseudonymous fools, influenced by bigger fools like Christopher Rufo. (I think he and Dorian are on a university board together! But I might be - probably/hopefully am - confusing things I have read.) I have bookmarked Rufo's essay "The Cat Eaters of Ohio" because it's really a Woodward-and-Bernstein level investigation. (Kidding, obviously). Such an essay convinces me that this toxic miasm will not last: both the excesses of DEI and the much greater excesses of those pushing a culture war for their own political power will fade away, hopefully when another electoral loss is delivered to their leader in a month. When the wackos can no longer get power through trumping up culture wars, they will be forced to try another conduit, or they will be supplanted by those centering more traditional, conservative values. https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-cat-eaters-of-ohio
Well said. Dorian's reference to the starvation caused in Ukraine by Marxist policies [Holodomor; or some such word; I don't even recall where I read it or even whether or not it was his essay], where the Soviets got rid of competent farmers, with resultant starvation, is a better comparison than Nazis kicking competent Jews and other dissenters out of universities. One is physical starvation when you get rid of competent farmers. The other is mental starvation when you get rid of competent thinkers.
You Americans are 34 trillion dollars in debt. But nobody ever asks the question:- From whom did the American Government borrow this 34 trillion? How much money have you put into your pension plan, Dr. McCullough? How much have you got in your savings account? Your leaders have borrowed all of it X 1.5 and allowed Banks to loan out about 1.5 X that amount, for a total of 3X whatever you've given banks and other funds. They borrowed it from you and a whole bunch of other people like you. Then they tell you what your "share" of the national debt is or that rich people should "pay their fair share". When you loan them money, you don't have to pay it back --- they do to you!!!
It took a hyperinflation and the resultant political chaos to bring goofy-mustache to power in Germany. Who might you get, if the Chinese persuade others to dump the American dollar as the world's reserve currency and the American dollar value begins to decrease rapidly because the world starts giving you back all those dollars that have gone overseas?
Idle thoughts, given nothing to debate about your post. Good job.
The USA's super-power status militarily is its collateral/enforcement mechanism for all obligations including that debt. It's only ~100 Elon Musk's worth. ; )
More seriously, of course it's current value is not a problem itself, so much as the dependency on its growth with time: that's the real problem.
"Give a man a fish, or teach a man to fish?" <--> "Give a nation some debt, or teach it to rely on deficit spending?"
I think the multilateral power of nations in the 21st century is perhaps the most serious issue geopolitical problem. If the USA and China can arrange, as they seem to be trying to do, to restore the world to a two-super-power stasis, that may be more stable. And China and the USA are so interdependent, any cold war/competition between the two is likely to be less fraught than the 20th century cold war. Of course, Europe and Russia will want their own status not overlooked. A related vulnerability is the ever increasing power (via technology) of individuals and small groups of individuals, or small nations. Those are my musings.
On geologic or astronomical or religious timescales, it's all gonna go to zero eventually. On climatic timescales, it's already headed that way and picking up speed. As someone once said, in the future it'll be good to live in any country that has snow plows and air conditioners. The former is an indicator of a not-too-hot climate (initially anyway) and the latter an indicator of relative wealth (and hence ability to cope).
Oops - this comment is way off topic. Enough. Good hearing from you, and thanks for contributing/disagreeing in a meaningful and civil manner.
Also wanted to share the posting made by the Chief of DEI, on October 7th, 'A Year of Revelations,' .
I felt exactly like someone mentioned in the comment 'Posting celebratory content on a day like October 7th, which marks a painful memory for many, like 9/11, could come across as tone-deaf or out of touch with what others are feeling. It’s always worth considering how timing might impact different audiences, especially in your role that champions diversity, equity, and inclusion.'
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7249029152534593539?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28ugcPost%3A7249029152534593539%2C7249047410927136768%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287249047410927136768%2Curn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A7249029152534593539%29
I agree with nearly everything this article says with one major exception. Athletic admissions should NOT be considered in the same category as "legacy" admissions and are in fact merit based. First, the article, likely by how the sentence was written, incorrectly states that athletic admissions favor white applicants. The greatest benefit from athletic admissions vis a vis regular admissions accrues to African Americans who likely would NOT be competitive to enter the universities in question with scholarships purely on academic merits. Unlike legacy or DEI admissions which are based on either your family connections or race/gender etc. none of which are based in merit, student athletes are admitted precisely BECAUSE of their athletic talent. It is the probably the purest example of merit based admission in academia. Now, one could argue that athletics should not be part of university life, but the reality is that athletics has always been a part of a classical education and our society would probably benefit of the average student had more athletic course requirements placed upon them, not less. College athletes must demonstrate merit in the tasks for which they were recruited while also performing adequately in their course work. Most student athletes are forced to maintain schedules that their non-athlete peers would NOT be able to sustain without major problems to their academic performance. While universities provide some academic support to their athletes (some even crossing the line into academic misconduct) overall, these do not compensate for the added physical and time commitments placed on student athletes. Given the revenue and marketing services that student athletes bring to their universities, they are more than pulling their weight based on the merit of the skills they bring to the court, field or ice. I would encourage faculty to actually learn more about the lives of student athletes before casting judgement against them.
Absolutely not. Athletic merit has nothing to do with the ability to pursue and reach academic goals. One has nothing to do with the other. No one who is not as academically qualified as the other students should be able to get into a university based on athletic merit. If anything, the sports teams should be professionalized and separated from the university proper. They could hire the most qualified athletes to play on the teams, reserving academic spots for the best and the brightest. If a student is qualified to enter the university on academic merit AND is a gifted athlete, they should be able to get paid for participation on sports teams as a way of financing their education. But only then.
ClemenceDane, I think you mistake the role athletics plays in the lives of most student athletes. Most of these students know they are not destined for a professional athletic career and are likely not really trying to achieve that. They are playing their sport because it is a part of their identity and is something they enjoy and often is a skill they bring that the university wants and is prepared to give partial or even full scholarship support to get them. Most of these students could attend a university without playing their sport, but choose which school they will attend because of the opportunity the school provides. This is no different than a student choosing a university for its music program or its engineering program over competitors that do not offer such options. Sadly, many student athletes efforts on behalf of their universities are NOT respected by faculty who feel athletics has no place on campus or that athletes are given unfair privileges/benefits either in admission or during their programs. I have seen faculty actively try to harm student athletes for missing class for their away games by telling them they have to choose between being a "serious" student or the "choice" to play a game. A student athlete no an athletic scholarship who doesn't fulfill their teams obligations will lose their scholarship and no longer be in school. Even when a scholarship is not in jeopardy, the student is part of a team and does not want to harm others on the team by not playing their role. The same faculty I have seen treat student athletes this way never applied that same standard to a student needing to miss a class for the debate time, a scientific conference or due to pregnancy. All of those are also choices that interfere with classes. Ironically, the inferiors status many academics hold toward athletics would not be understood or respected by the Greek scholars. It would also not fly at any of the military academies where athletic fitness is a requirement that students must hit benchmarks on so as to be ready for deployment by graduation. I asked an instructor from West Point is most college students could pass these requirements and he laughingly said no. He did say that college athletes would have no problem with the physical requirements of the academies. We have to remember that MERIT always exists in a context. Given the growing number of wars around the world and the fact that college students are THE age from which draftees come, our universities are doing their students a massive disservice in ignoring their athletic development. Just a thought....as the DEI world is NOT going to let elite college students avoid the next draft with deferrals while the working class is called to fight.
I agree, in some ways. The influence of athletics in American academia is a bit extreme. And I am not wild about it. I know it provides some income for various schools, and so on, but, at what cost?
I agree that a student should not be admitted to a university for athletic ability when they LACK the academic ability. That is not the case with most student athletes however. Let us compare the situation of a legacy, athlete and "regular" student. All 3 apply to a university and are expected to meet certain standards in various subjects related to study at a university. Not all students, however, will be admitted to an elite school which must choose from a subset to admit from a large applicant pool. With legacy admissions, weight is given to the family status of the applicant to admit them over other equally academically qualified students. With a student athlete, the decision to admit is based on an athletic ability NOT shared by others in the applicant pool. As such, their application is based on merit...not family or DEI status. Let us consider the same argument against student athletes could be used to keep up students with musical and artistic talents who are merely "average" in other areas. As said before, if all students had the demands placed on their time and energy that student athletes are expected to provide, most of these "regular" students would crash and burn under the load and fail to meet academic expectations as sometimes occurs with student athletes who underperform academically.
Hi Dean, I enjoyed your comments here, but I think you misjudged Dorian's article on the athletics. I searched it for athletics and found the single reference and it cites a PDF, which I searched and found footnote 6 which reads, "Removing preferences for recruited athletes leaves the number of African Americans essentially unchanged, with increases for Hispanic and Asian American admits. Removing legacy preferences increases the number of admits for each of the non-white groups." Footnote 6 is attached to a sentence, "We find that removing either of these preferences [legacy and athletes] would result in significantly fewer white admits with increases or no change in the number of African American, Hispanic, and Asian American admits." So Dorian's essay rephrases the issue of athletes per the cited source, which related to the Harvard case before the SCOTUS. Maybe you're position is correct for universities more broadly, I don't know.
It's intriguing to me how you make a criticism and respondents engage on your ideas, but if I make a comment, well... read for yourself. Such commentary makes me shake my head slowly and think about the expression on the woman's T-shirt that I linked to in my comment about Godwin's law. This venue could be a place for good discussion, but it isn't. Instead it is another echo chamber; far better than TwitterX but that's not saying much at all. Thank you for adding some cogent words and ideas in the comment section.
In this morning's Dealbook email from Andrew Ross Sorkin, his words help me understand why Dorian referenced 10/7 and then considers it mind-boggling for me to comment as I did about Godwin's law and Dorian's essay. I agree with Sorkin's last paragraph particularly. (Yes, Sorkin is the same person who interviewed Elon Musk when he famously told advertisers to "Go F*&^ Themselves." That's the same Elon Musk who last weekend earned the moniker, "DorkMAGA" when he jumped for joy on stage and then expressed he was "DarkMAGA.")
"Good morning. Andrew here. Today marks a year since Hamas’s barbaric murder spree in Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and some 250 others abducted. It was a moment that reshaped geopolitics, prompting Israel to go to war in Gaza in an effort to eliminate Hamas and giving rise to an escalating war in the Middle East that has killed tens of thousands and could ultimately transform the region.
It also marked a tipping point within many major American institutions, in business, higher education and beyond. Debates about diversity, equity and inclusion policies and so-called wokeness were raging before Oct. 7, 2023, but they took on new life after the attacks as protests broke out on college campuses and company messaging apps — some even before Israel had officially begun its military retaliation.
Elements of those demonstrations were laced with antisemitism, raising questions for some about what younger generations were being taught. And for some Jewish business leaders — many of whom had vocally supported D.E.I. initiatives — what emerged was a sense that there hadn’t been reciprocal protection from harassment and harm. A renewed backlash against D.E.I. erupted, including from prominent executives such as the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and the private equity mogul Marc Rowan, and some institutions played down their commitment to the approach.
The end result, sadly, is that we as a society are more divided than ever — when such a tragic event should have brought us together.
Hi Peter, my point which the article we are responding to raised, was that many in academia have the false notion that athletic emissions are like legacy and DEI admissions in being based on demographic/relation characteristics rather than merit. The original article linked athletic admissions to legacy admissions which is NOT appropriate. My point is that athletes are admitted on merit based on the athletic skills they bring and which the university is seeking when it fields a team that the athlete has skills for. It is no different than a university offering a scholarship to a musician needed to fill a spot in their orchestra, a talented theater major to support their Shakespeare festival, etc. While the university as a whole admits students generally, specific programs seek specific skills in their students and may value some skills, athletic, musical, artistic, mathematic over others as fits their needs. These are merit based admissions and its time we confront the anti-athlete sentiment. Assuming a black student is a DEI or affirmative action admission is not fair to the student unless backed by evidence that they are not academic qualified. Athletes deserve the same respect and not be simply written off as dumb jocks admitted to make the football team do well. Hope this makes sense.
Makes sense to me and thanks for taking the time to reply. My comment was keying in on your sentence in your original comment, "The greatest benefit from athletic admissions vis a vis regular admissions accrues to African Americans who likely would NOT be competitive to enter the universities in question with scholarships purely on academic merits." I suppose that sentence can be interpreted in different ways, so feel free to clarify, but my reply was just pointing out that the cited reference (Arcidiacono et al. 2020) stated that athletic preferences at Harvard tend to admit more *white* students than the rest of the admission policies in aggregate. (The whole thing is VERY complicated, as evidenced by that article running 46 pages and the SCOTUS review, etc etc). But I wholeheartedly agree with you that athletes aren't necessarily dumb jocks (some are, but many are not). I especially liked your comment, "Most student athletes are forced to maintain schedules that their non-athlete peers would NOT be able to sustain without major problems to their academic performance." Very true.
More generally, there's tension between the applicant's right to be treated fairly as an individual and the university's interest in recruiting the "best" incoming class each year. To give a sports analogy, the recruiter for an NFL team doesn't want the best players...they want the best *team* that they can recruit.
Also, I think there's a strong moral rationale (and practical rationale) for your comment, "Assuming a black student is a DEI or affirmative action admission is not fair to the student ..." and I think that argument is compelling and I hope we get close to that ideal in our society sooner rather than later particularly for that reason. University life already is a long way there...certainly more so than society writ larger, but politicians and such tend to see the glass half empty because they think it serves their purposes to ding university culture.
Hi Peter, Sorry for the delay in replying. To clarify my comments on who would benefits from athletic scholarships, I was not referring specifically to Harvard or to the Ivy League/Research I universities but academia generally. On a lot of these issues, what part of academia you are talking about actually ends up being very important. My experience teaching at various levels from community college to comprehensive 4 year schools to elite private research universities suggests that athletic scholarships, if probably given, enable students who are college ready to attend a specific school to play their sport that they would not have chosen or could not afford without that scholarship. Their sport is important to the student and will influence where they choose to go from among multiple options. At the community college level, the scholarship that comes from the sport may be the only way they can afford to get a start in college. The Minnesota community colleges tend to draw most of their students from within 90 minutes of campus, yet if you looked at the football and basketball teams, you see an entirely different demographic with rural Iron Range schools whose community diversity ranges from Norwegians to Swedes to Finns to Germans to various Slavic groups of Eastern Europe with football and basketball teams dominated by African Americans from Detroit, Chicago and rural schools in the Deep South. Many of these students are their first in their family to go to college and the family cannot even afford to visit them so far away. They are playing their sport not just out of enjoyment but because they have enough talent that they hope to transfer to a 4 year college with a scholarship that will pay for the rest of their degree. Few actually expect to get a professional career. These students are very vulnerable in some ways as the coaches sometimes make unreasonable demands on the students' time, negatively impacting their academics. The student is then in an impossible situation as they are far from home and face the devil's choice of losing their scholarship by not performing on the field or failing too many classes and being rendered ineligible or giving them too low a GPA to transfer. What they don't need is academics stereotyping them as unjustly admitted in the same way that Legacy Admits are. Given how few students successfully walk on to college athletic teams, these student athletes can truly say they were chosen for merit based on the position the college recruited them for as few of the other students in the college have the abilities to merit replacing them.
Hi Dean - good commentary, thanks. The athletic and legacy admissions favor the university's interests ($$). Whether it's the government's business, I don't know (at least for private universities). You and Dorian and Anna articulate your positions pretty well. Even if I disagree sometimes with those positions, it's informative to read/listen to them.
Just like the situation you addressed where it's unfair and rude to a student to assume they got admitted preferentially because of their skin color, it's similarly unfair and rude to the legacy admit to assume it was because of their familial connections. Eliminating that might be tricky, and it's not clear to me legacy admission is actually awful, but it would be nice for a child of a very rich person to be confident that they were admitted on their own merits.
In the few interactions I have had with the development offices of universities, I have always been very impressed with their "people skills." Makes sense, but it's interesting to experience, since in STEM we more often interact with people that have less keenly developed (or atrophied!) "people skills."
Very true. Most legacy students come from affluent and educated families meaning they likely would be competitive at many colleges, though maybe not the most select. There is a difference between legacy admissions than athletic and other merit based admissions. Athletic talent, musical talent, mathematical talent all refer to an attribute of the student that they bring to the campus. Legacy status has nothing to do with the attributes of the student, it is truly a status indicator more akin to skin color, gender or sexual orientation which are inherent to the student but say nothing about their abilities. That is why legacy admissions, like DEI admits, are NOT based in merit. That said, from a university relations/fundraising point of view...development officers see legacy admissions as serving their revenue purposes.
True. The real problem is probably not legacy admissions...it is the hiring bias toward those graduating from elite institutions. Eliminate that hiring bias and the incentive for legacy admissions drops immensely.
It is time to remove dribbling, shooting, running, passing, jumping, and all the other racist criteria the NBA uses to exclude old, white women from being represented.
Whoa! Cat on a hot tin Rufo, courtesy of Peter R. McCullough's post and link at the bottom! Political science, politics and investigative journalism gets weird!
Fully stand behind every word ….